Arts Festivals Summit 2019

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EFA Festival in Focus | Lucerne Festival

Simon Mundy, in interview with Michael Haefliger, Executive & Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival, looks at the festival’s history and current success

For
Lucerne's festival 2018 sees an impressive list of anniversaries: eighty years
since it was first held, thirty since an Easter festival was introduced to
complement the traditional summer one, and twenty since Michael Haefliger took
the helm as Director. Each of those anniversaries tells a story.

For
Lucerne's festival 2018 sees an impressive list of anniversaries: eighty years
since it was first held, thirty since an Easter festival was introduced to
complement the traditional summer one, and twenty since Michael Haefliger took
the helm as Director. Each of those anniversaries tells a story.

The first festival, in the summer of
1938, could hardly avoid politics; indeed it was a conscious reaction to them –
by celebrating Wagner's love of the lakeside in performances by musicians who
were known to oppose fascism or had been forced out of Germany, Austria and
Italy. At the same time, the point that music should heal divisions was made by
the involvement of many of Wagner's family.

That was the basis of the letter sent
that March to Arturo Toscanini by the Mayor of Lucerne, Jacob Zimmerli. The
idea was backed up by the great violinist Adolf Busch, who persuaded Toscanini
that the orchestra would be led by him and have at its core the members of his
own quartet and, through the good offices of Ernest Ansermet, the best players
in Switzerland. Soon the list of acceptances was extraordinary: among them the
conductors Bruno Walter, Fritz Busch, Wilhelm Mengelberg and Ansermet himself,
along with pianists Alfred Cortot and Rudolf Serkin and the cellist Emmanuel
Feuermann. At the end of the summer, on 25 August, Toscanini took his place in
front of the orchestra on a special platform built in the grounds of the villa
in Tribschen, where Wagner had written and, on Christmas morning 1870,
performed the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima. For the 1938 concert all
traffic by road, boat or air, was silenced; cows had their bells removed and
dogs were shut indoors (for a thorough description of this first two seasons,
see Harvey Sachs' excellent new biography of Toscanini). Mussolini was furious
and instructed that all Italians returning from the concert have their details
noted. Toscanini was denounced as 'an honorary Jew'. A few weeks later he fled
from Milan.

Michael Haefliger, Lucerne Festival

The following year he was joined in
Lucerne by Walter, Adrian Boult, Rachmaninov, Pablo Casals and Vladimir
Horowitz (all artists anathema to the Nazis). His performances of the Verdi
Requiem (with the young tenor Jussi Björling, whom he had first heard in London
a few months before) were seen as a requiem for peace itself. Days after the
end of the festival war broke out. Toscanini did not appear there again until
1946 but, apart from 1940, the festival went ahead, though not always with the
high ideals that had led to its foundation.

Over the following quarter of a century
the Lucerne Festival's reputation as being centred on the world's great
conductors, whether with Swiss players or visiting orchestras, was solidified.
Klemperer, Karajan, Ferenc Fricsay and Raphael Kubelik led the roster and in
1956 Rudolf Baumgartner founded the Lucerne Festival Strings, becoming festival
Artistic Director twelve years later (though his tenure ended in acrimony in
1980).

By 1988 the summer festival had found
new champions in Vladimir Ashkenazy and Claudio Abbado. It also expanded that
year, using the fiftieth anniversary to launch an Easter Festival, making use
of the city's church spaces, though it did not become a permanent feature of
the calender until Swiss conductor Matthias Bamert took over the reins in 1992.
He presided for six years until the violinist Michael Haefliger was appointed
and he has been in charge ever since.

The
festival “was always in my blood,” Michael says. It was part of his life
throughout childhood summer holidays because his father was the tenor Ernst
Haefliger, a favourite singer for Ferenc Fricsay and a festival regular into
the 1970s. Michael sees the years before he took over as one of sustaining
continuity and then growing up, cutting loose from the programme interests of
agents and reasserting its identity as an independent foundation. Once he was
there, he was able to take it in new directions and exploit the potential of
the superb new concert hall, including an autumn solo piano festival.

In one form or other having its own
orchestra was always at the heart of the festival, though it went through
several incarnations (for many of the early years appearing as the Swiss
Festival Orchestra). The original idea of Ansermet, Adolf Busch and
Toscanini's, to assemble a group from the best players available, survives in
the current Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which Michael founded with Claudio Abbado
in 2003 and continues with Riccardo Chailly. But that principle is also behind
many of the other ensembles that appear there, notably the Chamber Orchestra of
Europe (originally formed in the 80s by 'graduates' of the first European
Community Youth Orchestra) which has a strong festival partnership with Bernard
Haitink.

Choosing the LFO members is “a
conductor-led process” and the players tend to be established performers in
their thirties, mainly from Germany and Italy. It meets for half a month in the
summer and, in a recent innovation, another half month in the autumn when it
now tours, especially to Asia. Indeed, during Michael's time, the festival has
expanded in many directions. With Pierre Boulez he formed the Lucerne Festival
Academy in the same year as the Orchestra, which gathers over a hundred
musicians together to work on contemporary music, now directed by Wolfgang
Rihm. This gives the festival a chance to commission young composers too. After
their time with the Academy, many musicians return for their own concerts as
Alumni.

The Ark Nova

In
Asia Michael responded to Japan's 2011 earthquake by constructing the Festival
Ark Nova, a five hundred seat mobile and inflatable concert hall, with a cedar
wood interior from a Japanese region famed for its temples. In Shanghai there
is a commitment to build up a base over the coming five years.

He thinks of Lucerne festival as “the
greatest orchestra-led festival in the world”, where orchestra encompasses
almost anything that happens in a concert – achieved by bringing the cream of
conductors and chamber musicians, orchestral players and composers together.

Further Information on the Lucerne Festival

Famous
orchestras, legendary conductors, and virtuoso soloists join together three
times a year on the idyllic location of Lake Lucerne to celebrate the joy of
music. In the concert hall designed by Jean Nouvel, which is renowned for its
phenomenal acoustics and its exquisite architecture alike, they encounter an
audience that is no less international and sophisticated. Some 110,000 visitors
annually make the trip to Lucerne to experience one of the most exquisite and
storied music festivals and to hear the international stars of classical music
right in the heart of Switzerland.